From the "Socialists and proud of it" at Monthly Review, March 1:
Fishing is older than humanity. Paleontologists have found evidence that our ancestors Homo habilis and Homo erectus caught lake and river fish in east Africa a million years ago. Large shell deposits show that our Neanderthal cousins in what is now Portugal were harvesting shellfish over a hundred thousand years ago, as were Homo sapiens in South Africa. Island dwellers have been fishing in the southwestern Pacific for at least thirty-five millennia.1
For most of our species’ existence, fish were caught to be eaten by the fishers themselves. “They may have traded dried or smoked fish to neighbors, but this trade was not commerce in any modern sense. People donated food to those who needed it, in the certain knowledge that the donors would someday need the same charity.”2
Fishing for sale rather than consumption developed along with the emergence of class-divided urban societies about five thousand years ago. Getting fish to towns and cities where people could not catch it themselves required organized systems for catching, cleaning, preserving, transporting, and marketing. This was particularly true in the Roman Empire, where serving fresh fish at meals was a status symbol for the rich, and fish preserved by salting was an essential source of protein for soldiers and the urban poor. In addition to boats, an extensive shore-based infrastructure was needed to provide fish for millions of citizens and enslaved people: “elaborate concrete vats and other remains of ancient fish-processing plants have been found all along the coasts of Sicily, North Africa, Spain, and even Brittany on the North Atlantic.”3
The first surviving account of fish depletion caused by overfishing was written in Rome, about 100 CE. The poet Juvenal described a feast at which the fish served to the wealthy host had been imported from Corsica or Sicily, because
…our waters are already
Quite fished-out, totally exhausted by raging gluttony;
The market-makers so continually raking the shallows
With their nets, that the fry are never allowed to mature.
So the provinces stock our kitchens.Fish populations in rivers and coastal areas were also depleted by urban pollution. At the same meal, Juvenal says that a less-favored guest was served “a fish from the Tiber, covered with grey-green blotches…fed from the flowing sewer.”4
When the Roman Empire collapsed in Europe after 500 CE, commercial fishing contracted sharply: it was no longer safe or profitable to transport food large distances for sale. Fish was still on the menu everywhere, but for several centuries, “inland and coastal (shoreline) fisheries were common but local everywhere in medieval Europe.”5
“The First Mass-Produced Food Commodity”
Beginning in the eleventh century, increased political stability and renewed economic growth made possible what some historians call the “fish event horizon”—a rapid expansion of commercial fishing in the North and Baltic seas. Fishers in Norway and Iceland had two great advantages: proximity to waters that were home to more fish than all European rivers combined, and climates that were ideal for air drying cod. Hanging gutted fish on open-air racks for several months removed most of the water, leaving all the nutrients of fresh fish in hard sticks that could be eaten directly or soaked and cooked. The dried fish could be stored for years without spoiling.
Stockfish, as wind-dried cod and ling were called in medieval times, was the first mass-produced food commodity: a stable, light, and eminently transportable source of protein. From about 1100, Norway exported commercial quantities of stockfish to the European continent. By 1350, stockfish had become Iceland’s staple export commodity. English merchants, among others, brought grain, salt, and wine to trade for stockfish, but Icelandic fishermen could not keep up with European demand. Thus, after 1400, the English developed their own migratory fishery at Iceland, carried on at seasonal fishing stations.6
When Europe-wide trade reemerged, merchants found that air-dried cod from Norway and (later) salted herring from Holland commanded premium prices. Archeological evidence from across western Europe shows “a dramatic shift from local freshwater fish to air-dried cod from Norway from the eleventh century onwards.”7 For centuries to come, preserved fish from northern waters “fed the European need for a relatively cheap, long-lasting and transportable fish food.”8....
....MUCH MORE
I was not familiar with the term "fish event horizon". It must be when the fish crosses the surface of the water into the air. Or something.
And speaking of socialism, I've forgotten who raised the point: "Just as real socialism has never been tried, so too real feudalism has never been tried." Spoken like a true Liege-Lord wannabe.
Everybody wants to be the Liege, nobody wants to be the villein.
Recently from Monthly Review's editor, a very concise, lucid look at the big money push to privatize and financialize the commons linked and highlighted in Tuesday's "Securitize The Earth: Oil Trader Mercuria Creates A "Nature-Based" Investment Platform".
